Joan Baez still believes in the Day After Tomorrow

By Tara Murtha
Published: September 16th, 2008 | 12:20pm

Legendary for a sterling voice that rang clear through the haze of the ’60s, a steely commitment to nonviolence that found her arm-in-arm with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the day he spoke of his dream at the Lincoln Memorial, and an infamously turbulent inner life, Joan Baez still believes in the Day After Tomorrow.

Talking to the politically active Baez on the phone from her house a half an hour outside of San Francisco, it becomes clear that the woman I’m chatting with on the phone is no longer the precociously somber, dark-eyed girl whose life was crippled by knots of anxiety she called her “Spanish demons.”

The 67-year-old Baez — graceful with her high cheekbones and cropped grey hair — says she ripped her demons out “by the teeth” a few years back. As our conversation snakes through the subjects of her new album’s production (Day After Tomorrow is a cherry-picked, all-acoustic collection that showcases an all-star cast of seasoned Nashville players), Martin guitars, and Barack Obama, Baez giggles and laughs, especially when we start talking about how she finally began listening to Joan Baez albums just five years ago.

Baez confesses that she only recently got turned on to Joan, and that once she did, she realized there was a goldmine of records to explore. “Who is that girl?” she asked when hearing her earliest recordings. Fifty years after she first strummed folk ballads at Cambridge’s Club 47 as a teenager, we — her fans, other musicians, and Baez herself — keep listening, hoping to find out.

Let’s talk about the process of selecting the songs for Day After Tomorrow. Did you select them with Steve Earle?
There were probably three of us involved. I don’t go out and hunt. But other folks do go out and listen. They listen to them over and over to make sure they think it is a quality song, and then they send it to me, and I start my own process of listening to them and choosing.

So it’s more about the songs than the songwriters, because it’s an interesting collection of songwriters — having people like Tom Waits and Thea Gilmore on the same album.
It’s the songs. Ultimately, it has to be the song.

How conscious of a decision is it on your part or you and Steve’s together?
When they get down to the final level, it’s just myself. Steve sent me a bunch of songs, some of which I had already heard. They didn’t suit me at all. He was just swatting around in the dark. Some of them might have been fine with my voice, but they didn’t touch where they have to touch me for me to sing them.

The songs have a common thread in that they’re all derived from the Child Ballads [a collection of over 300 traditional Scottish and English ballads]. How conscious was that?
Well, very. I wanted songs that would essentially bookend the very beginning, which is all ballads and totally acoustic, just me and the guitar. Like “Rose of Sharon,” which is most like an old folk song, I just sing by myself or with a bass, because it sounds like that’s what it needs.

I really enjoyed “Jericho Road” [also on Steve Earle’s 2007 album Washington Square Serenade] and the arrangement on that. Can you tell me about the recording? Did you plan to arrange the song with only handclaps?
I didn’t plan anything, and I don’t think that Steve had either. We were just trudging along with these songs, and it dawned on him that that might be a good one to do. He treated it the way he knew he had to [in order to] make it different from the version on his own album. It was harder to record than most things, because it was a cappella, so we had to figure a lot of it out and not be propped up by instruments.

Do you feel a lot of pressure in your day-to-day life being such an icon and legend?
No [laughs]. I don’t really notice it a lot. Sometimes I do, but my friends say that I don’t pick up on a lot of things that they see — other people reacting to me — because I just kind of block it out. But people come up and say, “You’ve meant so much to me.” It’s usually political and musical. A lot of times they start crying, and then I accept that I meant that in their lives. All I hope to do is continue to bring them the more decent side of things, you know?

That said, what are some of the disadvantages of being so well known?
The only problem would be if I took it too seriously like some other people do. You just can’t do that. You want to believe everything good that everyone says about you, but you can’t because they don’t know you. They know their image of you and how they reacted to it, but that’s dangerous. To have somebody or a critic not like you is just as alarming.

How do you feel about listening to your old recordings? Do you?
I do, periodically. I am always stunned by the voice. I think, Is that another girl? Because I was so young, it’s so different to me now. I have admiration for that — for what she did, and the songs, and the way they came out.

What are some of the albums you listen to more than others, or more recently?
They come and go. You know, I didn’t start listening to my own music until about five years ago. All of a sudden it was like this goldmine, and I got completely stuck, and I think I listened to just about everything.

So you got really turned on to Joan Baez?
[Laughs] Yeah, I got really turned on. It’s a magnificent voice, and I can say that because I didn’t make it. You know, my job is maintenance and delivery, and the rest of it I consider a monumental gift.

If you just got turned on to Joan Baez, there’s a lot out there on YouTube. Have you seen any of that?
[Laughs] I’ve seen a little bit. I don’t spend any time looking for it, but sometimes my assistant will call over with, “You’ve got to see this!” I enjoy it, and I’m glad that other people have access to it.

So what about today? Other than Gilmore, are there any younger, folk-style musicians that you’re listening to lately?
I don’t know if you’d call it lately, because now the Indigo Girls are stateswoman, you know? And that just happened over the course of time that I’ve known them. Same with Dar Williams, she’s wonderful. I’m sure they’re in there, but I’m not remembering.

What kind of guitar are you playing in general now and specifically on the album?
On the album, I played Steve’s. I don’t even know what it was. I liked the sound of it. I liked the way it fit my hands. Generally when I travel, I travel with a guitar called a Wren. It was made in Canada. Then I have with me one of the Martins. Martin did a limited-edition [Joan Baez signature model guitar in 1998. Fifty-nine were produced] a few years back, and they gave me the No. 1 Joan Baez guitar and I think three others. I gave them all away [laughs], because I have this thing about not needing all the extra stuff. At the moment I need to borrow one, so I’m borrowing it from Dar.

I recently read your second autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, which was published in ’87. Would you consider writing another?
Oh, you know I probably still have one left in me. A lot of stuff has gone down since then.

That’s what I mean. You need another volume! Do you think it would be much different in writing style?
You know, I don’t know, probably. I’ve written a lot of poetry in the last 20 years and that informs how I write prose. So maybe it would be a little different, more poetry and prose.

In the book, you talked a lot about what you call your “Spanish demons.” Do you still have them?
No, I bit off the core of my problems by going to intensive therapy for a number of years. Not the kind that paralyzes you and keeps you on the couch, because I was very active during those years, but I did really get those demons by the teeth and throw them out for the most part.

It takes a tremendous amount of work, and I realized that up until I actually did it, I didn’t have much faith that psychotherapy does much. I thought it was hogwash. You meet people and go, oh they’ll never change, and they never do. But I did. I really made a totally different life for myself.

So that means you don’t have anxiety attacks anymore?
I really do not! And I don’t have any stage fright. I’m at the point where I have to sort of jack myself up before I go on stage, because I don’t have that adrenaline that you need.

You’re too blasé about it?
No, I don’t want to be blasé, so I do a few other kinds of tricks to get myself in a place where I have that particular energy it takes to be on stage.

Does this change in your life have anything to do with the other big change: how you surprisingly came out in support of party politics by supporting Obama in the primary? What made you support a particular candidate?
No, that’s just Obama. As he trudges along in his journey, of course I’ll like less and less of what he has to do to be president. And maybe he would be incapable — once he gets there — of doing the things that I think are of value.

But he is so reminiscent to me of civil rights, and he’s such a speaker, and he would be such a statesman. We don’t have a statesman here, you know?

I imagine people were surprised that you didn’t support Clinton.
Oh yeah. But you know, I’ve never really been a feminist. I’ve never been a black-power or brown-power or red-power or woman-power [person], it just kind of was people. And the feminist movement doesn’t like to hear that. Obviously there’s tremendous value and necessity for women coming up to a level that they deserve all these years, and Hillary was an example of that. I was not crazy about her style, but she certainly — even in my caustic mind — deserves a lot of credit for the battle she put up. Just, I would just appreciate if she quit now [laughs].

To that point, you didn’t see — especially in the music industry — that there were any barriers specific to you because you’re a woman?
Well, see, it’s different when you’re the celebrity, as opposed to some woman trying to work in the industry as something like an engineer, or somebody working in an office, or anything. Those are the women who have had the difficulty getting recognized as equal to men. When you’re a star, pardon the expression, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman, or a man, or somewhere in between.It doesn’t matter.

If you were able to lock George W. Bush in a room and sing him one song, what would it be?
[Laughs] You know what comes to mind? “If I Had a Hammer.”

—
www.joanbaez.com